girls:
173k births since 1880
#227 (96th percentile)
boys:
360 births since 1972
#4226 (8th percentile)
overall:
173.4k births since 1880
#436 (94th percentile)
The name Molly is the #436 most popular name of all time in the U.S. on a gender-neutral basis, with a total of 173,386 recorded births since 1880. This represents the 94.4% percentile of name popularity (more popular than 94.4% of all names). For girls, it ranks #227 (96.0% percentile) for all time with 173,026 births since 1880. For boys, it ranks #4,226 (7.8% percentile) for all time with 360 births since 1972.
Molly has appeared in U.S. birth records since the beginning of our dataset in 1880 (since 1880 for girls and since 1972 for boys).
The name Molly has been given almost exclusively to girls, with 99.8% of all recorded births being female.
For girls, Molly reached its peak popularity in 2011, achieving the 91.8% percentile (ranked #78) with 1,866 births per million. The name was most common in 1991, with 2,288 births per million (ranked 91.4% percentile). Since reaching a high point in 2013, the popularity of this name for girls has been declining. Currently, Molly ranks #200 for girls (79.0% percentile) with 818 births per million, which is 35.7% of its peak share of births.
For boys, Molly reached its peak popularity in 1989, achieving the 4.2% percentile (ranked #725) with 16 births per million. The name was most common in 1989, with 16 births per million (ranked 4.2% percentile). There have been no recorded male births with this name since 2014.
This chart shows the total number of births per million babies in each year for the name "Molly".
These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Molly.
These similar-looking names have spellings that are closest to the spelling of "Molly", in the sense that there are the fewest number of letter differences between the two spellings. These names exclude other spelling variations of this name. View all variations of Molly.
Our model has identified 2 different pronunciations for the name Molly. Click the play button under each pronunciation to hear it spoken aloud.
Our model is 90.2% confident that Molly is pronounced as MAH-lee, which has 2 syllables. The next most likely pronunciation is MAW-lee, at 9.8% confidence, with 2 syllables.
If none of the pronunciations above sound right to you, could you please check whether any of these related pronunciations should be applied to the name Molly? These are pronunciations that other similar names use, but which are not currently associated with Molly. If you think any of these are valid pronunciations for Molly, please vote using the thumbs up button.
Our confidence scores estimate the likelihood that a particular pronunciation is the most correct for a given name spelling. These scores are derived from pronunciation dictionaries, manual verification, your feedback, and a fine-tuned large language model trained to generate name pronunciations.
For any given spelling, confidence scores across all identified pronunciations sum to 100%. However, these scores don't account for the possibility of valid pronunciations that our model hasn't identified.
The raw pronunciations shown (like M AA1 L IY0) use the ARPAbet phoneme system, a standardized way to represent English speech sounds. Each symbol represents a distinct sound in American English. Visit the ARPAbet Wikipedia page to learn more about these phonetic symbols.
Pronunciation audio is generated by an open source text to speech model that has been customized to adhere to pronunciations provided in ARPAbet format, but sometimes pronunciations that differ subtly will sound identical, particularly if the only difference is the level of emphasis on a syllable or a single vowel sound.
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